Introduction

As the btrfs wiki says: â€œBtrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration.â€ Although under heavy development, it has become stable enough for personal use, and there are plenty of reasons to try it. What distinguishes it from earlier filesystems is that it has been designed with scalability and robustness in mind: it can handle huge files (up to 16EiB â€” a lot!), it can pack lots of files and directories efficiently, has built-in error detection methods (checksums of data and metadata), support for transparent compression, integrated multiple devices support (RAID-0, RAID-1 and RAID-10 so far) and more â€” see here for a more complete list.

In this how-to I will focus on one particularly neat feature: snapshots. Btrfs allows you to make read-only or writable snapshots of the state of your filesystem without wasting space with redundant data. Together with YaSTâ€™s Snapper module, this makes tracking FS changes and undoing undesired modifications a breeze.

As Benjaman Brunner announced yesterday, openSUSE 11.3 has reached end of life.Â As a quick refresher, openSUSE releases new versions every 8 months, and each version has a life cycle of 18 months.Â As 11.3 was released in July of 2010, the time has come to embrace our newer versions, including the successful release of 12.1 in November of 2011.

As Brunner’s announcement indicates, we worked hard to maintain 11.3 while developing its subsequent two releases (11.4 and 12.1.) And of course, we’re already gearing up for 12.2, slated for release in July.Â And the first milestone release is already just around the corner.Â You’ll be able to try out Milestone 1 on February 9th.

End of January the US Congress will vote to pass two laws, the “PROTECT IP Act” (PIPA) and the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). If these laws pass they would enable copyright holders to get court orders against websites accused of doing or facilitating copyright infringement. So far so good, the openSUSE Project is against copyright violations.

We are a community that provides free and easy access to Free and Open Source Software. We innovate, integrate, polish, document, distribute, maintain and support one of the world’s best Linux distributions. We are working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source community. And in this community there is no room for copyright abuses. That however does not mean that the end justifies the means. We at openSUSE are opposed to the proposals because we depend on our users to not only be able to freely and openly contribute their code but also their opinion and other information. Why that is threatened by these proposals, you can read over at the EFF, or watch this video from Fight for the Future

We hope the decision to blackout openSUSE.org will educate people around the world about this issue that threatens the basics of the internet, will make some US based contributors, friends and users contact their representatives in congress and inspire others to join the strike.

The SAN array of the backend server server lost 3 hard disks over the weekend.

That means the array with the built RPMs was broken. We checked and replaced a lot of files from backups – but since not all binary parts of the projects are in backup we need to rebuild some of them (31 from 24,194) afterwards.

The good news: sources and project configurations were affected by this.

After the openSUSE 2011 Conference, we run a survey to gather feedback so that we can improve for the next conference. The overall feedback was very positive. Thanks a lot to the 134 people that participated in the survey!

openSUSE Education team is proud to present another edition of openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e (Linux for Education) based on openSUSE 12.1. Li-f-e comes loaded with everything that students, parents, teachers and system admins of educational institutions may need.

Softwares for mathematics, chemistry, astronomy etc, servers like KIWI-LTSP, Fedena school ERP, Moodle course management etc., full multimedia, graphics, office suite, many popular programming languages including AMP stack, java, C, C++, python, ruby, latest stable Gnome and KDE desktop environments and lot more is packed in this release. More about softwares included here.

To know more about openSUSE Education project, file bugs, request enhancements, participate, or to get in touch with us visit Education Portal.

Create live USB stick or DVD with this image. About 15GB disk space and 1GB RAM is required for installation, more is better. Please note that we release 32bit image only, for users with RAM 4G or more install and use kernel-pae package.